The latest installment of the dialogue between Lehman and Lummis on film noir centers on this question:
What is your opinion of Lizabeth Scott as a noir heroine?
Suzanne Lummis:
I have a feeling I’ll enjoy hearing you talk about her. I like her fine, but I think the noir actresses who fare best within our contemporary understanding of acting, how spontaneous and authentic it should be, are Barbara Stanwyck and Gloria Grahame. Oh, and Claire Trevor. Back then, actresses especially were either permitted or required to be phony—and sometimes it sets my teeth on edge. In The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, where Scott's not a femme fatale but a friendless woman down on her luck, in one scene she did this thing that would be unthinkable for an actor on the screen today—out of the blue, she put her head in her arms on the table and made crying sounds. Have you ever seen anyone do that in life, cry noisily face down on a table? And in Dead Reckoning you can see the glycerin under her eyes. It didn’t matter to audiences then, but our expectations have changed. I shouldn’t blame Lizabeth Scott; it was symptomatic of a larger problem re. how actresses (far more than actors) were trained. Also, I haven’t seen all her movies—I hear she did one with Dan Duryea that’s her best performance.
David Lehman:
I became aware of a bias against Lizabeth Scott some time ago; she was disparaged as the poor man’s Lauren Bacall. Dead Reckoning is pretty terrible, but that’s not specific to her. On the other hand, her work in Too Late for Tears – the movie with Dan Duryea to which you refer – is marvelous. Eddie Muller showed it on TCM recently and she was, in her own blonde way, as superb a noir heroine as you could want, dispatching both Arthur Kennedy and Mr. Duryea and outfoxing a lot of other folks until she meets a bad end in Mexico. She is as ruthless, as narcissistic, as beautiful and blonde, and as exploitative of her gender as one could ask for in a noir heroine.
Click here to read last week's installment and here for the whole series, of which this is #6 in the series.
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